Inside ‘Love in the Time of Corona’: How a TV Show About a Pandemic Was Pitched, Written and Shot From Quarantine

The five months since the start of the pandemic have seen no shortage of quarantine-related content, but nothing quite as ambitious or technically impressive as Freeform’s “Love in the Time of Corona.” The four-part limited series was first announced back in early May, barely a month-and-a-half after COVID-19 brought TV production to a screeching halt. At the time, details about the project were scant, simply describing it as “a funny and hopeful look at the search for love, sex and connection during this time of social distancing.” The network said the show would film using “remote technologies,” calling to mind the Zoom reunion panels or one-off scripted outings featuring a row of talking heads. The final version of “Love in the Time of Corona,” however, bears little resemblance to those other projects. “I didn’t want to do a show with people in boxes on the screen,” executive producer Joanna Johnson said in an interview with TheWrap. “We really wanted to produce a real show. And I don’t think that you would know, necessarily, if you watched it that we were doing this in quarantine.”

The original idea for the show came when Johnson’s manager mentioned she had begun dating someone she’d been set up with virtually. “We were talking about the quarantine life for people and how people were still trying to make connections and still realizing the things that were missing in the relationships they had, or thinking about the relationships they wish they had,” Johnson said. “And she said, I think this would make a great show.” Beyond the shorter runtimes and limited locations — everything was shot inside the cast’s real homes — there’s little to betray in the final product that “Love in the Time of Corona” was shot with remote-controlled cameras and a skeleton crew of only a handful of people. Every scene is covered from multiple angles, with sound and lighting convincingly near the level of a normal production — a far cry from heads in boxes. “We had a super small crew, but it’s all my team from ‘Good Trouble,’” Johnson said. “I was working with my friends, so it was like a very professional student film; it felt that intimate. And we were all in the trenches together. We were all wearing different hats. Everybody was pulling cable or moving things around, doing what they could.” On any given day of shooting, Johnson estimates there were no more than seven people on location, including the actors inside and Johnson out in a van nearby. The actors were responsible for their own hair and makeup, as well as a wardrobe sourced primarily from their own closets. One crew member was allowed to enter beforehand when no one else was around to block out the shots, but the actors or friends and family they were co-quarantining with were often called on to help move the two cameras around on the day. “Compare that maybe seven people to a good 70 people working on ‘Good Trouble.’ It was such a different experience,” she said. “Everybody gave 110%, but everybody was into it,” Johnson said. “You know, we wanted to pull this off. We wanted to make this work, so there was a great attitude … And the actors were wonderful. They were really enthusiastic and excited to be working. They were excited to be working in their homes and they seemed to like the collaboration, the intimacy of it.”

With just over three months between series order to series premiere, “Love in the Time of Corona” came together at a whirlwind pace. It tells four tangentially connected but largely independent stories about people living through the first month of the COVID-19 pandemic, with each story tailored to the actors cast to star in them. All actors who appear on screen together were living together at least for the duration of the shoot, including real-life couple Leslie Odom Jr. and Nicolette Robinson and roommates Tommy Dorfman and Rainey Qualley. “We basically asked agents, ‘Okay, who you got that’s quarantining together?’” Johnson said. “Then I sort of backed the story ideas into that and wrote the scripts, ultimately, in about two weeks to three weeks. And then we were shooting in July.” The challenge of making such an of-the-moment series, naturally, is the way moments tend to change. The plot of “Love in the Time of Corona” ends in early May, well before the death of George Floyd and the subsequent explosion of protests around the country became a foundational aspect of the so-called “Time of Corona.” “We were in the middle of the writing of the episodes and the pre-production part when George Floyd was murdered,” Johnson said. “For a moment we paused and wondered, can we still do the show? I mean, would it feel trite, or would it feel in any way, like we weren’t recognizing that part of the pandemic, that part of the quarantine?”

Johnson said it was ultimately decided, in conjunction with the network, that the show should stand as it was conceived, as a snapshot of the period in history when the national mood was defined by a sense of isolation and collective loneliness. “Love in the Time of Corona” simply alludes to the conversation about racial injustice bubbling under the surface by weaving the death of Ahmaud Arbery into Odom and Robinson’s storyline. The show similarly opts not to reckon with the human toll of the pandemic, a task almost certainly beyond the scope of a four-part series shot with such limited time and crew. The disease itself rarely gets a mention beyond the series title. “I didn’t want to do a show about coronavirus,” Johnson said. “I wanted to do a show really about the effects of quarantine … Definitely, the characters in our show are privileged in the sense that they’re not suffering in the ways that so many people are.” “Other shows are tackling that, and that’s really important as well,” she continued. “Love in the Time of Corona,” however, is not a show about tragedy. “We chose to do a more hopeful version,” Johnson said. “When we watch TV these days, you know, we kind of want escape, and we kind of want some kind of positive message. That was the tone we decided to set with this show.”

“Love in the Time of Corona” will premiere across two nights, Saturday, Aug. 22 and Sunday, Aug. 23 at 8 p.m. on Freeform.